Intuition in Judgment and Decision-Making

Intuition in Judgment and Decision-Making: Extensive Thinking Without Effort: A Summary This paper looks at a strong argument made by Betsch and Glockner in the paper "Intuition in Judgment and Decision-Making: Extensive Thinking without Effort." Ultimately Betsch and Glockner argue that intuition is a mental process where complex streams of information can be processed without a huge cognitive effort (2010). The authors also argue that the intuitive process of the individual are how information can become integrated, whereas analytic information just guides the search, generation and swap of information (2010).

Betsch and Glockner spend the bulk of the paper arguing in favor of this notion and demonstrating that the integration of information and the prioritization of information is something which can be engaged in without cognitive control and which is unfettered by the amount of encoded information or cognitive capacity (2010).

The paper thus continues in talking about how these findings can impact the bounded rationality perspective and the multiple method approach to judgment and decision-making; in the final branch of the paper the authors discuss the connectionist framework for integrating the intuitive and analytic thought processes (Betsch & Glockner, 2010). After aptly pointing out that the phenomenon of intuition has been given so many names throughout time, it ceases to have real meaning anymore, Betsch and Glockner point out one of the common fallacies with defining intuition.

The authors explain that many academics in the past have illuminated intuition as an oversimplified cognitive process characterized by reduced complex judgments (Betsch & Glockner, 2010). The authors contend that this is not what intuition is at all. Rather Betsch and Glockner propose that intuition is actually a process where extensive processing occurs with no commonly noticeable effort (Betsch & Glockner, 2010).

One way in which the authors lucidly define intuition is by saying that "intuitive processes operate autonomously and automatically, that is, they function without conscious control and cannot easily be accessed by introspection. Moreover, they can process multiple pieces of information in parallel. Analytic processes are performed step-by-step. The sequence and direction of these processes can be deliberately controlled, and the actor is consciously aware of performing these processes" (Betsch & Glockner, 2010).

These definitions are so important and so distinctive, that it's wise of the authors to publish their definitions side by side. Analyzing takes work and takes conscious steps; instead, with intuition, there's an effortlessness involved to the entire mental processes. There can be a subtler, more muted analysis which is occurring, that is far more nebulous, but still happening nonetheless. Fundamentally, Betsch and Glockner define intuitive processes as "extensive thinking without the effort" (2010).

Betsch and Glockner then review experiments which demonstrate that truly comprehensive information integration can occur even when cognitive capabilities are constricted by another task all together and even when a given individual does not intend to engage in a summary assessment of factors and objects (2010). The authors describe a study where participants were supposed to assess values of shares while paying attention to strategic ads.

"Across a number of studies, the astounding finding was that evaluative judgments consistently reflected the sum of return values… The results indicate that the mere encoding of value laden information (monetary outcomes) was a sufficient condition for instigating the integration of this input information" (Betsch & Glockner, 2010).

Another issue that the authors examine is the use of the Mouselab when examining things like mental processes and cognition and how this method is flawed in gauging these things because it requires motor behavior to uncover hidden information and places constraints on information acquisition (Betsch & Glockner, 2010).

However, when the authors used things like the Mouselab they were able to prove how their participants were able to engage in extensive consideration and assessment in less than 1.5 seconds, thus, highlighting their apt usage of their own intricate and extensive cognitive processes -- in an entirely cognitive manner (2010). Another fascinating aspect of the authors' findings regarding intuition is that the mind processes more information faster and more rapidly than a smaller amount of information.

"A reduction of the amount of information resulted in an increase of decision time when coherence decreased. When the reduction of information was accompanied by a decrease in coherence, less information was processed more slowly than in the control condition containing the entire set of information" (Betsch & Glockner, 2010). This evidence shows without a doubt the power and capabilities of the human mental processes regarding intuition and that intuition is able to process and analyze large.